With two large conferences to be celebrated this year in Malmö and Mexico City, Federico Demaria, writing for the Ecologist, charts the evolution of the Degrowth movement over the last ten years.

Federico Demaria: This year we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first international degrowth conference in Paris. This event introduced the originally French activist slogan décroissance into the English-speaking world and international academia as degrowth.

I want to take stock of the last decade in terms of conferences, publications, training and more recently policy making. I focus only on the academic achievements in English, leaving aside both activism and intellectual debates in other languages – these are huge, especially in French, Spanish, Italian and German.

This is not because I think it is more important, but simply because it is the process in which I have been personally involved.

International conferences

The academic collective Research & Degrowth (R&D) aims at the facilitation of networking and the flow of ideas between various actors working on degrowth, especially in academia.

Apart from demonstrating the latest research in the field, the conferences aim at promoting cooperative research and work in the formulation and development of research and political proposals. In keeping with this spirit, in 2018 there will be three international conferences:

3) Degrowth in the EU Parliament: Post-growth conference to challenge the economic thinking of EU institutions with influent EU policy-makers in the European parliament of Brussels (Belgium) on 18-19 September.

Many other conferences and workshops have taken place. For instance, the conferences of the European Society for Ecological Economics (ESEE) – Istanbul 2011, Lille 2013, Leeds 2015 and Budapest 2017 – have been important to advance the debate and the society has endorsed the degrowth conferences since Paris 2008.

We might be assisting in the emergence of a new scientific paradigm, in the sense of “universally recognised scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of researchers” (Kuhn, 1962: x).

Blank canvas

The future is a blank canvas. We need to think of aims, strategies and priorities. Let me mention two, one looking inward into the degrowth community, and the other reaching outward.

Inward, there is the survey for mapping degrowth groups worldwide. The resulting map will represent an attempt to bring together groups and individuals for political and practical actions on degrowth that builds upon the biennial conferences.

The map might evolve into a (loose) network that fosters the creation of synergies among individuals and organizations that situates degrowth as the common horizon. The degrowth blog already offers a space for these conversations.

A networking meeting will be held at Christiania (Copenhagen), one day before the Malmo conference.

Looking outward

Outward, one aspect is to strengthen the relationships with close research and activist communities like the ones of feminism, environmental justice, political ecology, ecological economics, post-extractivism, anti-racism, commons, decoloniality, post-development and economic and environmental history.

For the future, in Budapest Ashish Kothari (min 52.25) proposed a ‘Global Confluences of Alternatives’, along the lines of the Indian experience, Vikalp Sangam (Hindi for ‘Confluence of Alternatives’).

The start could be a joint visioning process. Fortunately, there are already great ongoing projects, like TransforMap to get motivated and learn from.

The ‘how’ and ‘why’

The ‘how’ needs to be thought through – e.g. it could be a joint conference – but the ‘why’ is clear.

The alliances among these networks, and networks of networks, are fundamental to weave the alternatives and foster a deeply radical socio-ecological transformation.

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Stacco Troncoso

Stacco Troncoso (Spain) is the advocacy coordinator of the P2P Foundation as well as the project lead for Commons Transition, the P2PF’s main communication and advocacy hub. He is also co-founder of the P2P translation collective Guerrilla Translation and designer/content editor for CommonsTransition.org, the P2P Foundation blog and the new Commons Strategies Group website. His work in communicating commons culture extends to public speaking and relationship-building with prefigurative communities, policymakers and potential commoners worldwide.